Base campers

So I’ve been using Basecamp as the project extranet for the Lecture List. It’s just fantastic to see a web-based tool so well implemented, it’s a beauty, it’s fast, it just works very very well :-)

One of the interface details is “fade” pannels–areas that are bright yellow on pageload, but very quickly fade to white.

The idea is sound–let’s say you’ve just added a comment to a long list of comments. Once you click on “add my comment” the page reloads and in the process you/05/”loose your place” visually on the returned page. The “fade” pannel takes your eye right back to where you were adding something. A simple device, but very cool:-)

I implemented a similar fade-to-white effect as a page transition on the Pumpernickle site. At the time I was in the thick of another Flash-or-no-Flash argument (yawn) on a bulletin board and I sort of wrote it to prove to someone that you could make smooth, beautiful transitions without plugings.

Anyway, I’m no programmer, but I got something dirty together and it’s served well over the last few years.

I was curious to see how 37Signals had solved the interval-time and colour-step array problems (I ended up with two arrays–one for decreasing time steps and one for colours).

I just wanted to say “wow”. We are soooo not worthy;-) The 37S javascript file is absolutely tiny, the system uses only one array, the function that does the job is four lines of code and it’s called recursively (of course).